Forced Rebirth
by blacksand1
Summary: His one mistake was getting caught. Oneshot, rated for slightly disturbing content, some language and general safety, spawned from a crazy theory about DmC 5. R&R !


_DISCLAIMER: I don't own Devil May Cry. I do own this oneshot and the theory that goes with it._

He turned to crime in the beginning not to make a statement, and not because he was bored or greedy. No, he did it because rebellion was flowing through his veins, crime was woven into his muscles, and misbehavior was carved into his bones.

His family did little to stop him; his elder brothers encouraged his behavior while his younger brothers (and one sister) sought to emulate it. His mother didn't really care as long as he didn't hurt himself or get caught (in fact, she taught him some of the more useful techniques he knew and her own habits spurred his lifelong love affair with nicotine into being).

This kind of situation was not at all abnormal, considering the poverty in which he was raised- all the fault of living in a city where the governing dictatorship was too busy creating mechanical abominations and desperately seeking a way to revive their ill-chosen savior to actively take care of their citizenry.

As he got older and things in the city actually got _worse _(he hadn't been aware that was actually possible for this shithole), he turned to crime anew with the new purpose of making sure his younger siblings and mother could live to see another day. But despite what he told himself, underneath it all he engaged in criminal activity to gain a sense of freedom.

He knew that people in this town had no future and no hope of seeing the world outside its grime and graffiti-covered walls. But every time he dashed across the rooftops in the dead of night with weapons and thousands of dollars in stolen jewelry on his person, he felt like he had escaped this hellish slum and was a part of the night sky, in harmony with the stars and moon (seemingly the only things the insane government hadn't ruined and had no control over).

And then his feet would hit the ground, and he was reminded that his sister was looking too thin for her age while his youngest brother was developing a nasty cough and that he'd better get to hawking this stuff for way more than it was worth before the police caught up to him and beheaded him on the spot.

That kind of thinking became nearly nostalgic the day he actually did get caught. His mind had been racing faster than a speeding bullet as he was dragged away to the gigantesque prison that loomed over all other buildings in the city; he worried for his family, for himself, and he also wondered if they'd give him a spoon to dig his way out with. That thought was mostly a joke, but he seriously considered it for a second before he mentally slapped himself back into being serious.

When he thought about it, the worst part of prison was the stifling atmosphere. He always did have a lot of freedom when it came to movement around the city, so being stuck in one building all the time wasn't exactly his idea of fun. Other than that, he was comparatively lucky; he didn't have a cellmate and he actually made some _friends_, the most important ones being a sneaky embezzler and a butch woman who had murdered seven people in one night. All in all, it wasn't that bad. That really said something, although about what or who was up for debate.

Things took yet another turn for the worse when he got in his first and only fight, a no-holds-barred throw down between himself and a man three times his size half-covered in tattoos. His opponent hadn't been particularly smart, which was to be expected from someone of his size; he had faced worse within his own family, the fight hadn't been challenging at all. His butch friend had timed it, and she said it took about a minute.

However, before he could use his defeat of the mighty glacier as an opportunity to seize power and command a thousand year reign over the prison, three guards snuck up on him and hauled him down into the bowels of the prison, depositing him in a solitary confinement cell. It was a grimy cell with one light coming from the center of the ceiling, but besides the presence of one large mechanical eye embedded into the wall above the door and the fact he had to be strung up by his wrists, there wasn't much to talk about. The mechanical Cyclops informed him in a monotone that the governing cult had seen the mysterious substance known as 'potential' within him; it didn't elaborate on what exactly that meant, and he didn't have much time to ponder it before he was ushered to another room.

He was subjected to several tests of strength, stamina and skill with varying weapons, pushing him far beyond his limits and presenting him with weapons he'd never even heard of before. It was a rigorous and confusing affair; never mind the fact that they were giving _weapons _to a dangerous criminal that had several degrees of assault and battery on his rap sheet- since _when _did the government care about _anyone _other than their 'savior', potential or no potential?

When they had successfully tested every aspect of his physical abilities, they locked him up in solitary for the night. He got the last good sleep of his life in that cell, which marked the beginning of the hell to come.

His life became a series of rooms, and the events that occurred within. Events should've been more distinguishing, but for some reason he found the rooms themselves to describe the experiences better than the experiences themselves.

It started with the screening room; in the morning he'd be dragged into a room that was all white, then strapped into the chair bolted to the center of the floor. Before he could wonder about the purpose of this room, the white walls, floor and ceiling would reveal themselves to be gigantic LED screens by playing video after unrelenting video of a long-dead man with snowy white hair, a blood-red cloak, and a cocky attitude killing demons by the thousands. While he watched the 'savior' demonstrate his legacy, a loud mechanical monotone shouted what were basically orders at him.

"_YOUR NAME IS DANTE. YOU WERE BORN TO SPARDA AND EVA. YOUR TWIN BROTHER IS VERGIL. YOU…"_

He wouldn't understand why this room even existed until the videos had ran their course and the monotone had finished detailing the savior's life in the second person, when he'd be thrown back into that room with the cycloptic interrogation specialist. It would recount what day of the month it was (it was _supposed _to recount what day of the vague process it was, but the AI reset every month for maintenance purposes), address him by the prisoner number he never really memorized, then bombard him with questions from its perch.

It would ask him his name, his parentage, his siblings' names, etc. Whenever he answered with what he knew to be true, an electric current would race through the cuffs holding his wrists and administer a painful electric shock. If he stayed silent, the eye would ask again, then shock him if he was silent once more or gave the wrong answer. It really was quite a sophisticated machine, since it was able to actually get frustrated with his disobedience.

It was then that it hit him and he fully realized what they were trying to do. They were conditioning him, reshaping him in the image of the savior they had devoted their entire lives to worshipping. If the cult could not resurrect him, they would simply recreate him. So, _that _was the potential they had seen.

All that rebellion in his blood bubbled to the surface and immediately he fought against every plan they had for him with the ferocity of a man possessed. He kept his eyes shut tight in the screening room, and when they forced his eyes open he screamed to drown out the brainwashing voice ordering him to believe a lie. He struggled against the shocks administered by the AI, shouting that he'd always be the man his family made him, cursing at it in Spanish he'd picked up from his mother, and asserting that he'd never be their savior. This always drove the Cyclops up the wall, and one time he even got it to overload from all the 'mental stress'.

Of course they kept him in top physical shape during this process; every day they had him train in hand-to-hand combat as well as with a pair of bulky black and white pistols and a gigantic sword. Those weapons were indeed powerful- he had seen what the savior had done with them, he knew what they were capable of- but they just weren't his style and using them was a hassle. His problems with the weapons aside, the daily combat training was the highlight of his experience, since all the physical exertion took his mind off of his predicament and he ended every training session with an escape attempt. Though he was quickly subdued every time, he still held onto the hope that he could beat them. Hope was all he had, hope and memories of his family outside these walls.

And then the experiments began.

A quarter of the way through the conditioning process, he would wake up in the cleanest room he had ever seen and probably ever would see again, strapped to a table and surrounded by scientists whose faces were always obscured by some kind of mask. They would inform him that- this is taking out all specifics and all the words in 'science-talk'- he was too human to be a perfect replica of their savior, and that they were going to correct that biological 'error'.

They would proceed to stick giant needles into his skin, injecting God-Knows-What into his bloodstream. They would take out tools more commonly seen in a particularly sadistic serial killer's basement and work on his body, rearranging his muscles, reshaping his bone structure, dissecting his organs and sewing them back up just for the hell of it. They changed and manipulated his body down to the cellular level, sometimes taking days at a time to finish up one procedure.

And he was helpless to do anything about it. He wasn't sedated, but he was numbed to the point where he was, for all intents and purposes, _paralyzed_. He couldn't scream for them to stop, couldn't call for help, and was forced to watch as they took his intestines and replaced them with a genetically altered form of that same organ. He could feel it all, and the fact that it didn't hurt made it even worse. The worst of them all was when they drained and replaced _all of his blood_. He remembered the experiments in horrifyingly clear detail, and every night after they had finished he would just lie on his back, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling and praying to anyone that would listen for this to just be a dream.

This process continued, and it all lasted exactly one year. His natural rebelliousness had died down to a tiny glowing pinprick, while a new sense of rebellion that the cult had molded to suit their ends replaced the rest of it. The shocks, stock footage and syringes had taken their toll on his body, on his mind, on his sanity and very sense of self. It was a constant battle between himself and the savior, and the savior was winning.

His memories were flickering, with the ones he desperately tried to hold onto being slowly overpowered by the ones his mind was tricking him into thinking were his own. When he tried to think of his mother, it was a fifty-fifty chance that he'd come up with either the olive-skinned, dark-haired, tough-as-nails smoker that raised him all alone with only her values from southern Europe to help her, or a fair-haired, fair-skinned, gentle-hearted saint who raised him for a few years before she died a martyr for the simple cause of protecting her sons. His own siblings, all five of them, faded in and out, the dark-featured, fiery and mismatched rabble being replaced with one white-haired and serious young man who had a never-ending desire for power. The bulky weapons he once hated were becoming more and more like old friends.

That spark of his old self constantly urged him to fight back, telling him that maybe they'd give up one of these days and throw him out. They both knew that'd never happen; if they _did _give up, they'd kill him, not release him. Besides, they knew that he was about to break. They wouldn't give up when the man they had elevated into a god was so close to being reborn within his body, they'd just push harder until he finally let himself fall into their lies. He _wanted _to hold on, but the artificial consciousness of the savior was eating away at everything.

His last time in the screening room was an odd affair; he stared at his feet while the savior smashed all his memories into dust and replaced them with his own. That little spark was encased in a bubble of hope, but it was flimsy and doomed to be blown into oblivion. The mechanical monotone had been lowered from a powerful brainwashing agent to a loud voice just stating the obvious.

He wasn't dragged to the interrogation room so much as he was gently nudged in its direction while he dragged his feet, defeated. He was chained up as always as the AI came to life anew that day. It recounted that it was the thirteenth day of this month, then addressed him by his number once again. That small glimmer of his past called out to him.

"_This is our last stand, please! You have to have to fight!"_

"WHAT IS YOUR NAME?"

He didn't fight, but he did stay silent. As the savior encroached upon the last vestiges of his memories, he sank into the last memory he had; it was a peaceful one, he had just come back from stealing some money and a few supplies, even stealing his little sister a locket because her birthday was tomorrow. His older brothers were there, their mother made everyone something hot to drink, and they all just sat on the porch while the younger ones played, smoking, talking, and enjoying the twilight. It was times like that when things didn't seem so bad, and it was almost like they lived in a normal city and had normal problems that didn't involve who would eat and who would starve the next day.

"I WILL ASK YOU AGAIN…"

The savior's shadow fell over that last spark.

"WHAT. IS. YOUR. NAME."

"_Diego! Your name is Diego! Say it! Just say-!"_

That last little spark's shield of hope fell to the ground and it was blown out by a wind of defeat. He looked up at the mechanical Cyclops with a rebellion not his own shining in his eyes.

"My name is Dante."


End file.
